A site with two brains.
sararuffini.com is my main site. I edit video for a living, so the homepage had to move before anyone read a word. This page is me looking at it from the other side: what I wanted it to feel like, and what I had to build to get there.
ScopeConcept, art direction, copy, motion, frontend, CMS, deployment.
I've been editing since I was 13. A homepage is just another cut. You get about three seconds before someone scrolls.
Claim, then proof.
The homepage starts like a good edit. Two lines, I talk fast and I edit faster, and right under them my showreel. Nobody has to trust the words, the video is already playing. The About page can wait.
I do talk fast. Ask anyone who has met me. If the site felt slow it would be lying about me.
Not a grid. A route.
My featured work is eight polaroids sewn onto a curve. A playhead rides it while you scroll sideways, the cards swell when it passes them, the labels tilt, a few doodles spin in the background. Grab the playhead if you want to drive.
Grids are for archives. I wanted my projects pinned on a wall, a bit crooked, with a thread running through them.
Half of me wanted it. The other half built it.
What I wanted
- Heart, creativity, storytelling. Three words, three colours, one rail you can drag.
- Stickers, cut paper, thick borders, hard shadows.
- One loud colour per section, never three.
- A hand drawn scribble as the signature. It is always the last thing to appear.
What I built
- A CMS that lives in git. I can edit every word from /admin, no database, nothing to pay each month.
- An image pipeline that turns each upload into three WebP sizes.
- Presets, so a new project page starts from one that already works.
- My old hand written HTML pages wrapped in Next.js. I threw nothing away.
A collection of work made with heart, creativity and storytelling.
I'm equal parts creative and nerdy about tech. I get genuinely excited when something breaks and I get to figure it out. Half of the CMS exists because of that.
Nothing here costs money to keep online. That's a design decision too.
Fin
Everything in this Lab started as a side quest from this site.
The note on the homepage says it: my other brain lives here. PlayTribe, Squadar, 3Days. All of them began as things I wanted to try after building my own site.
Next: PlayTribe app →